To War with Wellington

by Peter Snow

  It was not until 31 August that Graham felt ready to order the assault on two breaches the guns had opened in the walls of San Sebastián. This time the forlorn hope, the spearhead of the storming party, would move in daylight, and they would be backed up by men from the crack Light Division despatched by Wellington from their camp near the border. George Gleig, who was later to know Wellington well and write a lively biography of him, was a raw seventeen-year-old recruit when the ship carrying him to Spain arrived at San Sebastián in the middle of the siege. The 31st of August dawned dark and gloomy ‘as if the elements had been aware of the approaching conflict, and were determined to add to its awfulness by their disorder. A close and oppressive heat pervaded the atmosphere.’ Major Snodgrass was assigned to command a Portuguese battalion in a frontal assault on the walls – across the River Urumea. During the night he did a bold and very risky piece of personal reconnaissance. He crept forward to the river, identified a spot where he could ford it, breasted his way through the water, felt his way stealthily up the smaller, seaward of the two breaches and stood on the top of it for a moment looking over the town. ‘How he managed’, said Gleig, ‘to elude the vigilance of the French sentinels I know not.’

  By 11 a.m. Graham’s men were ready. Soldiers readied their muskets, officers drew their swords. None spoke. The first casualty was Sir Richard Fletcher, Wellington’s brilliant engineer who had masterminded the Lines of Torres Vedras. He was shot through the head as he carried out a last-minute survey of the state of the breaches. Then the stormers were up and scrambling through sand, water, rock and mud towards the wall. It was the first major daylight assault on a fortress in the Peninsular War. The French had a clear view of their enemy emerging from trenches they had dug for shelter a few hundred yards away. The defenders held their fire till they were closer, and then opened fire ‘with the most deadly effect. Grape, canister, musketry, shells, grenades, every species of missile, in short, which modern warfare supplies, were hurled from the ramparts; beneath which our gallant fellows dropped like corn before the reaper; insomuch that, in the space of two minutes, the river was choked up with the bodies of the killed and wounded’.

  Richard Henegan was standing beside Lieutenant General Graham watching the slaughter. ‘As each succeeding party fell, so did another and another rush on with fearful shouts over the bodies of the slain, gaining the summit of the breach, and falling lifeless on it, as soon as gained.’ Then suddenly the gaze of the spectators switched to the right where the Portuguese battalion, their dark uniforms a striking contrast to the British redcoats, surged across the sand and into the river. Led by Major Snodgrass waving his sword several yards ahead of their front rank, they waded, with the water above their waists, and threw themselves at the smaller breach. Again, the French opened up with everything in their armoury. ‘An “Oh!” burst from General Graham’s lips as he looked upon the murderous havoc made in the ranks of those brave men.’ What made the French defence so effective was the deadly fire of a line of sharpshooters, protected by a small rampart they had built at the top of the breaches.

  After two hours of slaughter Graham was faced with the prospect of utter failure. Then his chief gunner, Colonel Dickson, made a suggestion that was to sharpen the effectiveness of artillery on the battlefield from then on. He asked permission for his batteries to fire over the heads of the attacking British and Portuguese. He believed they could fire accurately enough to pick off the sharpshooters without killing their own men. He was proved right. The gunfire had an immediate effect, and one lucky howitzer shell struck a magazine just behind the rampart which exploded among the defenders with devastating effect. ‘In every direction,’ Henegan recalled, ‘these hapless beings fell by the force of the explosion: legs and arms, heads and headless bodies, showered over the ramparts among our men, who, shouting with exultation, rushed with frenzied enthusiasm to every crevice that offered admittance.’

  The garrison commander, General Rey, withdrew his troops to the castle on the end of the promontory, which they continued to defend for another week. The town itself was soon on fire and being sacked by a mob of soldiers desperate for revenge for their fallen comrades and soon maddened by drink. Casks of wine and spirits were strewn in the streets by defenders anxious to delay the attackers, but this only had the effect of driving them to further extremes. ‘Fortunately there were few females in the place; but of the fate of the few which were there, I cannot even now think without a shudder. The houses were everywhere ransacked, the furniture wantonly broken, the churches profaned, the images dashed to pieces.’ The British had lost 3,000 in the siege but nothing excused the atrocities that followed their victory.

  All this led to a huge row between Wellington and the Spanish authorities in Cadiz. He was appalled by the behaviour of his troops in San Sebastián, but infuriated by the way his Spanish allies reacted. They claimed that his troops had set fire to the town and effectively committed war crimes against the Spanish civilian population. The French had set fire to the houses themselves, Wellington said. He was so angry he nearly resigned his position as commander in chief of Spanish forces. He was restrained by the fact that his carefully nurtured construction of a joint Anglo-Portuguese–Spanish military coalition was producing valuable dividends. The Portuguese forces were now an essential and integral part of his army. They had had four years of training in battle, and as George Hennell remarked, after admiring the valiant Portuguese attack on the breach, ‘See what our example and instruction have done. 5 years ago 100 French would have driven 1000 of these troops before them like sheep.’ And Wellington had the very same day, 31 August, witnessed the Spanish 4th Division fight off an attempt by Marshal Soult to cross the Bidasoa in a belated attempt to rescue San Sebastián. At one stage the Spanish commander appealed to him for help, but he refused it, pointing out that it was better for Spain to show the world that its forces could now win victories on their own. This Spanish military success greatly encouraged Wellington, but it did little to shore up his brittle relationship with the Cortes, the republican parliament in Cadiz. The military alliance was to survive till the end of the war, but to hold it together Wellington had to display a level of tact and diplomacy that didn’t come naturally.

  14

  Extraordinary news

  Southern France, 1813–1814

  THE FRENCH THRUST across the Bidasoa on 31 August 1813 was Soult’s last major attempt to claw back territory in Spain. Harry Smith, a brigade major with the Light Division, watched Soult’s men ford the river on the 31st and attack the Spanish forces on the other side. The Spanish fought stoutly and pushed them back. And when the French turned back they found the river high and the fords impassable. So they had to make for the one bridge – at Vera, held by a small detachment of Smith’s comrades. He was infuriated when his commander, Brigadier Skerrett, would send only a small force to hold the bridge and the cluster of houses beside it. Smith was for posting an entire battalion of around 500 there. Skerrett said no, it was to be only a company of fifty under the command of Smith’s friend Daniel Cadoux. Smith asked Skerrett if he really meant that to be an order. ‘Yes,’ said Skerrett, ‘I have already told you so.’ ‘We shall repent this before daybreak,’ Smith fired back.

  The little band at the bridge found itself facing thousands of retreating French, desperate to cross. ‘Three successive times, with half his gallant band did he [Cadoux] charge and drive back the enemy over the bridge, the other half remaining in the houses as support.’ But then ‘a melancholy shot pierced his head, and he fell lifeless from his horse’. The French forced the bridge and escaped, and the following morning Smith found the bridge ‘almost choked with the dead’. Cadoux and sixteen of his men had died, but they had killed 230 French. Wellington, said Smith, was ‘awfully annoyed’, and Smith was delighted when Skerrett went home sick shortly afterwards. The new brigade commander was John Colborne, a man Smith admired as much as he loathed Skerrett.

  Wellington kept his forces poised on t
he Bidasoa throughout September. The news from Germany was still inconclusive and the French garrison in Pamplona held out. He told the government in London that he recognised public opinion at home was growing impatient: ‘I see that as usual the newspapers on all sides are raising the public expectation and that the allies are very anxious that we should enter France … I think I ought,’ he conceded with obvious reluctance, ‘and will bend a little to the views of the allies if it can be done with safety to the army, notwithstanding that I acknowledge I should prefer to turn my attention to Catalonia [in eastern Spain] as soon as I have secured this frontier.’

  So with great skill and elaborate planning Wellington embarked on a surefooted but painstakingly slow winter campaign to loosen Napoleon’s hold on France itself. He moved cautiously because the immediate future was uncertain. If Napoleon succeeded in subduing central Europe again, he could turn on Wellington with all that was left of his Grande Armée and challenge him to fight a decisive battle on French soil. If, on the other hand, he were defeated in Germany and forced back into France, the road could be open to Paris – with the allies forcing him back from the north-east and Wellington pressing up from the south. But Paris was 450 miles away from the border with Spain and Soult had a lot of fight left in him yet. Wellington set in motion a sequence of advances, none of them spectacular, each of them with the limited ambition of lopping off successive slices of French territory from one river line to another.

  Wellington’s move to establish his first foothold in France began on 7 October when he sent his men across the Bidasoa, the river that was at its seaward end the border between France and Spain. Wellington adopted the stratagem Soult had used in his abortive offensive on 24 July – in reverse. His observations, through his own telescope and from his intelligence sources, suggested that Soult appeared to be expecting an attack in the mountain passes rather than on the coast. So Wellington made as if to attack in the passes, with a feint attack at Maya, but launched his main assault at daybreak on the coast at Hendaye, and in the foothills of the Pyrenees at Vera.

  The first, on the coast, was very quickly successful. The attack went across at the lowest point of the tide, but the river’s flow was strong enough to sweep away a few who were killed or wounded by the first shots from the other shore. After wading through the river some of the men were faced by a battery of French guns. They managed to fire a musket volley at the gunners and then scare them away by charging with bayonets and shouting wildly. Fred Ponsonby’s 12th Light Dragoons were soon across too.

  There was intense competition among mounted regiments to be first into any fray, and to prove themselves in the face of Wellington’s profound scepticism about their competence. Ponsonby’s regimental history haughtily dismisses all the other cavalry as ‘up to their bellies in fine hay and straw doing nothing … But Colonel Ponsonby is such a man he is never quiet unless he is in the middle of everything.’ Once across on the French bank of the river Ponsonby was soon helping to push the enemy back as far as Urrugne, three miles inside France – just short of Saint-Jean-de-Luz. There Ponsonby’s dragoons ran into a strong French cavalry reserve force which stopped them. Ponsonby’s mother wrote a typically glowing account of her son’s exploits. His light dragoons ‘only had to ride quietly through with the enemy flying before them quite panic struck’.

  The second attack – at Vera in the foothills of the Pyrenees ten miles to the east – was a much fiercer struggle. Wellington gave the job to the Light Division supported by the Spanish. Their objective was to clear the French out of the valley of Vera and off the mountain passes above it that led into France. But the ground was against them. The passes were dominated by the great pyramid-like massif of La Rhune. Today it is a magnificent tourist viewing-point reached by a mountain railway. In October 1813 La Rhune, the passes and the surrounding wooded slopes were alive with French earthworks and well-entrenched sharpshooters.

  John Colborne’s brigade had the most daunting task of all. They had no choice but to attack the French head on. Harry Smith was with Colborne and recalled the ‘swarm of riflemen in skirmishing order keeping up a murderous fire. Firing up a hill is far more destructive than firing down, as the balls in the latter case fly over.’ Smith and Colborne were on horseback. John Cooke was scrambling up on foot like most of the soldiers. They didn’t just have to face enemy fire: ‘The mountain was fearfully difficult of ascent, and it was indeed so intersected with rocks, trees, brushwood, and prickly briars that our hands and limbs were pierced with thorns and the trousers were literally torn to shreds from off our legs.’

  After Colborne had captured one position, he pushed on ‘rather madly’ up a ravine with Smith and a small group of men. ‘To my dismay,’ wrote Colborne, ‘I saw a body of about 400 French passing … below me. The only way was to put a good face on the matter.’ So he coolly rode up to the French officer at the head of the column and said in French: ‘You are cut off. Lay down your arms.’ The officer, completely fooled, offered his sword and told his men to lay down their arms. Then Colborne turned to Harry Smith: ‘Quick, Smith, get a few men together or we are yet in a scrape.’ At that moment Colborne had only around fifteen men. ‘I kept the French officer in play, and [Smith’s reinforcement] arrived before the French had discovered their error.’ ‘We were called madmen for our audacity,’ said Smith afterwards. ‘I never witnessed such presence of mind as Colborne evinced on this occasion.’

  Wellington wrote warmly of Colborne in his despatches, saying his men carried the enemy positions in a ‘most gallant style’. But he was none too pleased when one of Colborne’s officers blithely announced to the Commander in Chief that he had taken some pigs and poultry from a French farm. Wellington, anxious as ever to prevent his soldiers grabbing local produce and alienating the local population, told Colborne, ‘Though your brigade have even more than usually distinguished themselves, we must respect the property of the country.’ Colborne replied, ‘I am fully aware of it, my lord … but your lordship well knows in the very heat of action a little irregularity will occur.’ ‘Ah Ah!’ said Wellington. ‘Stop it in future, Colborne.’

  Wellington quickly tightened up discipline as he moved further into France. The Spanish, eager to avenge the French behaviour in Spain, were the worst offenders. Picton had long regarded the Spanish as hopeless fighters. Now he counted them useless allies. ‘We should do much better’, he said, ‘without these vapouring poltroon rascals whose irregular conduct indisposes everyone towards us.’ Wellington told his generals to punish offenders with the utmost severity. August Schaumann watched Ned Pakenham, Wellington’s brother-in-law, ‘riding up and down our columns like a raving lion seeking whom he might devour. His command “Let that man be hanged instantly!” was executed in a twinkling.’ Schaumann saw ‘the body of one Spanish muleteer, who had entered a house to steal apples, hanging from the window of that house as a warning to all marauders. In his mouth, which had fallen open in the process of strangulation, they had stuck an apple to show what he had coveted.’

  The winter cold had started. One of Harry Smith’s friends built a little mud hut for Harry and Juana to sleep in. It was snug and warm inside. The couple turned over their chilly tent to their servants and cuddled up to each other in their new den. ‘All went well until a sudden shower of rain came on … In ten seconds it came down through the roof of our black-earth sods, and … we were drenched to the skin and as black as chimney-sweepers. The buoyant spirits of my wife and the ridiculous position we were in made her laugh herself warm.’

  William Lawrence, the ploughboy from Dorset, earned promotion when he led his squad to take out a French gun that had been firing at Wellington. Lawrence and six chosen men crept up to within reach of the gun and prepared to attack. ‘At last when ready, I said “Now my men, examine your flints and priming, so that all things may go right.” They did so, saying “All right, Corporal, we will follow you,” so I too sang out “Now for a gold chain or a wooden leg” … we jumped up, and givi
ng them a volley we charged them and succeeded in gaining the cannon.’ Wellington was so impressed he came up to Lawrence, asked him his name and said, ‘I shall think of you another day.’ A little later Lawrence heard he was a sergeant: it upped his pay by sixpence a day to one shilling and eleven pence.

  One new arrival, a ‘Johnny Newcome’ with a keen eye and a lively pen was the dapper Welsh guardsman Rees Gronow. He soon got his first glimpse of the ‘immortal Wellington’ riding past with Fitzroy Somerset and the rest of his staff. ‘He was very stern and grave-looking; he was in deep meditation, so long as I kept him in view, and spoke to no one. His features were bold, and I saw much decision of character in his expression. He rode a knowing-looking, thorough-bred horse, and wore a gray overcoat, Hessian boots, and a large cocked hat.’ Wellington had good reason to be looking stern and grave. He was still deeply uncertain about what to do next. On 18 October he wrote to London: ‘I am very doubtful indeed about the advantage of moving any farther forward here at present.’ The uncertainty was being decisively resolved on that very day in central Europe. Napoleon suffered his second biggest reverse of the entire war so far. Russia had been a catastrophe for him. The Battle of Leipzig between 16 and 19 October was the beginning of the end. Defeated by Britain’s three allies, Russia, Prussia and Austria, Napoleon began a retreat that was to end with his abdication in Paris in April 1814. But Wellington knew nothing of this, and Pamplona still held out against him.

  For much of October, from the heights above Vera, Harry Smith and John Colborne watched the French fortifying the line of the next river beyond the Bidasoa, the Nivelle, which runs down from the Pyrenees to its mouth at Saint-Jean-de-Luz on the coast. Wellington would join them from time to time, and on 8 November he said to Colborne, ‘Those fellows think themselves invulnerable, but I will beat them out, and with great ease … the enemy have not men to man the works and lines they occupy … I can pour a greater force on certain points than they can concentrate to resist me.’ He then squatted down with his generals and ‘it was’, said Smith, ‘one of the most interesting scenes I have ever witnessed’. He watched Wellington go through his plan of attack with his Quartermaster General, his chief staff officer George Murray. Then while Wellington scanned the enemy lines with his telescope Murray read back to him a summary of the orders he had issued. ‘My Lord, is this your desire?’ asked Murray. Wellington smiled his assent, and said the plan would win them the battle. This time, to keep Soult guessing, Wellington switched the weight of his offensive away from his left wing on the coast. The main attack would be through the mountain passes. By 10 November the army were poised to attack across the Nivelle. Harry Smith nearly forgot to say goodbye to his wife, who told him she had had a presentiment that either he or his horse would die. ‘I laughed and said, “… I hope it may be the horse.”’